


Paris Burns Too Bright

by thesecrethistry



Series: Paris Burns Too Bright [1]
Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Police, Angst, Depression, Drinking, Law Enforcement, Lots of Angst, M/M, officer! grantaire
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 15:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4751522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecrethistry/pseuds/thesecrethistry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire is a lot of things: full time alcoholic, full time waste of space, part-time police officer, and now he's a conspirator. He's not sure how he ended up helping a well known terrorist organisation, known and the Friends, break into the police station to steal some files they needed, but now he's in too deep and not even a pretty face or a bottle of liquor can help him get out of this one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paris Burns Too Bright

**Author's Note:**

> First chapter in my new e/R fic...lets see how it goes.  
> I'm pretty excited for this one; I've been playing around with the idea for a while now, and let me tell you: it's gonna be a long one.  
> Hope you enjoy the first chapter as much as i did writing it

It was a quarter to midnight and Grantaire swore if he had to listen to the tumultuous screech of the sirens above his head once more he’d politely exit the vehicle and step into moving traffic. It was a perpetual sound. Even when he switched the sirens off, he could still hear them singing in the enclave of his mind. The fact that Grantaire was half-drunk, half-hungover, didn’t help the situation. It simultaneously aggravated his headache and angered him, reminding him he wasn’t drunk enough to be swamped by euphoria.  
Pulled over, meters away from the nearest streetlight, Grantaire reached under the seat of the police car, revealing a half-empty bottle of clear liquid. He took a long slug that ignited a fire in his throat, travelling through his body, but he didn’t wince. He loved the feeling of burning alcohol because he knew what came next: the sublime lightness, like his limbs were made of clouds. But it didn’t last.  
The feeling was interrupted by the radio crackling, bringing him down.  
“Incident reported on 232 Rose Avenue. Witness reported seeing a hooded figure defacing…” Grantaire’s attention span failed him. Someone else can take this one, he had thought. Besides, there was only an hour left of his shift. By the time he had driven over there, checked out the area, and driven back to the station, it would be way over his time. The radio crackled on, awaiting a response, but no one took the job.  
With a sigh, Grantaire pulled the radio forward and accepted the assignment. This was the problem with working the late shift on a Saturday night: the city was filled with drunks causing problems, which caused the police department even more problems. Grantaire hated dealing with them. It was ironic that Grantaire was exactly the type of person he didn’t want to see on a Saturday night.  
But a job was a job, and he couldn’t get fired from another job, especially when his father worked so hard to get him this one. Grantaire had come within a breath of failing his police training, and with his dad on the force, it was no mystery who had pulled some strings to get him a place. And getting fired meant being kicked out. He wondered if they’d heard the slow slur of his voice; the collisions of S’s and C’s and T’s were always a sign that he was drunk. He didn’t particularly care; he expected a wave of fear to grasp his heart, wrap around his throat, but he felt nothing. Not even guilt that he was more than one drink over the driving limit. He just wanted to get home, finish his bottle, and pass out. He flicked on his sirens for the last time that night and sped off, desperate to not do any overtime. 

The location was a quaint district of the city, filled with flowers spilling from windows, affluent homes, and what he could imagine as fake families hidden behind the walls. It was unnervingly desolate; he didn’t pass a single person on his way to the location. He could only imagine how many disgruntled people emerged from their slumber from the blaring sound of his siren. For the first time tonight, Grantaire smiled. It was a lovely neighbourhood, he had thought, and he decided if he did end up both jobless and homeless, this was the place he’d beg for money. It seemed as though they had more than enough to spare.  
Pulling up at his destination, he silenced the car, but left the blue and red lights swirling, and got out. He took out his torch and lit the area, walking through the less-appealing end of the residence. It comprised derelict abandoned homes, back allies, and deconstructed buildings. Rubble lay in place of the memories made in the buildings. Grantaire walked slowly, reminding himself of the mechanics of walking. _One foot in front of the other. ___Although no one was around, he didn’t want to stumble and be known as the ‘drunk officer’. He didn’t want to lose his job.  
As he approached the exact address, his hand drifted to rest on the gun on his belt, and he moved with caution. It was just a spray painting incident, but he’d learnt that you can never be too careful. He’d once went in to taken an already-detained shoplifter to the station, only to have the shoplifter jump up and shoot three bullets at him.  
“Shit,” a voice said, sparking from the destruction, accompanying a scuffle of footsteps. There was a clatter of metal hitting the floor and half a dozen boys came into view. Shit, indeed, he had thought. There was one of him and six of them. And he was barely in the position to be able to accost even one of them.  
“FREEZE!” Grantaire shouted, waving the torch, but not the gun, at them. They did not freeze; they fled.  
They jumped over mounds of rubble, scurrying past Grantaire. “STOP, PUT YOUR HANDS UP!” he tried again, but it was futile. They didn’t care about obeying a cop’s orders; they’d already broken the law.  
But as they stumbled through the rubble, fleeing the scene, a single voice could be heard in the distance. Moving the flash light across the area, Grantaire hunted for the owner of the voice, but his perception was off. Instead, he decided to follow it.  
“Shit,” they cursed. Three paces to the right.  
“GUYS!” they called. “I need help.”  
Grantaire frowned as he moved forward. Poor guy hadn’t realised he’d been long abandoned.  
As the voice continued to curse and cry out, Grantaire navigated himself towards him.  
The light found him first, illuminating the back of boy—or a man; it was too early to tell. But in his infinitesimal experience, it was often teenagers he caught causing trouble in this area. It was the famous spray painting ground, after all. Nothing made a good canvas like abandoned buildings. From here, he would cuff the kid and take him back to the station. He would be asked for the names of his accomplices—which he won’t give up (apparently loyalty is still important even when they’d abandoned you)—while they waited for his parents to pick him up and it would all be over. It was pointless really. The other officers thought it was a good scare tactic, but Grantaire knew that within a week the kid would be back on the scene of the crime. He would know; he used to be that kid.  
The boy was moving, slowly, away from Grantaire. He limped from one block of rubble to the next. As he moved, he winced or cursed. Grantaire’s eyes drifted from the locks of flowing blond hair to the source of the boys limp. His ankle, twisted in an awkward angle, must have gotten caught in the mess at their feet. Despite this, and despite that he knew Grantaire was only a step behind him, he didn’t give in.  
Grantaire sighed. “Give it up. You’re not going anywhere, kid.”  
“If you want to take me, it’ll have to be by force.”  
Grantaire shook his head and placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. It was quickly shrugged off. “You’re already hurt. Let’s not make it any worse.”  
He limped another step forward. His breath caught between his teeth. “Because that would be awful, wouldn’t it? Don’t pretend like that isn’t exactly what you and your fascist regime want to do.”  
He scoffed. Fascist? That was enough. He’d tried to reason with him, but it was to no avail. Grantaire gripped the scuff of his collar, tugging him backwards. Stumbling, the boy flailed; arms flung backwards into empty space. A stray lurch of an elbow flung into Grantaire’s cheek, a few centimetres below his eye.  
“Shit,” he seethed, losing both his grip on the boy’s shirt and his footing on the rocks. It was his turn to flail, falling backwards. His feet went up first, flying above his body as his head sunk like a rock in a river, bringing him closer to the ground. In the seconds before his head hit the rubble, the boy turned. In fact, Grantaire realised, he was not a boy at all, but about the same age as Grantaire. He was just rather skinny. The boy—man—contorted his face as he watched him fall.  
As his head met the rocks beneath him, his head fell to the right and his torched jumped from his hand, rolling away. The light projected onto the wall. The last thing Grantaire saw before his succumbed to the darkness was a painting of the Eiffel tower. It burned bright, wrapped in vivid scarves of gold. Above it, it harsh letters read:  
_Paris is made of gasoline and your prime minster is the match. Don’t let it burn. ___

“You know it’s illegal to drink and drive.” This was the first thing Grantaire heard when he gained consciousness. The second thing he heard was sirens. But they weren’t coming from his vehicle. It was somewhere in the distance, speeding through the streets. He was, in fact, in his patrol car, laying across the back seats, while the criminal sat in the driver’s seat. Keys were in the ignition. They were moving through the city. “Is it illegal to drink on the job as well? It could result in missions being compromised.” He paused and looked in the mirror at Grantaire, who was now sat up, clutching the back of his head. “You would know all about compromised missions, wouldn’t you?”  
“Ugh,” Grantaire groaned, gripping the back of the headrest and swinging his legs forward. The first thing he felt was fire. It rippled through him like violent waves. They began in his skull and quickly drowned out the entirety of his body.  
The second thing he felt was the gravity of the situation.  
There was a criminal driving his car. He was sat in his seat with his keys in the ignition, driving considerably fast through the backstreets of downtown Paris. Hundreds of thoughts raced through his mind in an instant. They tore through his brain, all fighting to be first, only worsening the pain. Did the criminal have his gun too? Where was he going? Why hadn’t he just left him there for someone else to find? Grantaire knew he was fucked. He was in bouts of pain. And he was so going to lose his job.  
“You may quite possibly be the worst police officer I’ve ever seen.”  
“Will you shut the fuck up?” Grantaire groaned, running a hand through his hair. When he pulled back, he saw the crimson stains on his fingers. It was thick and warm and it glowed as they drove under every street light.  
The man blinked and looked in the mirror again. Grantaire had positioned his head between his legs now. Hands curled in his wild locks. “What was that?”  
Without realising, Grantaire’s request had not come out as a sentence. Instead, it had been a collision of sounds all mashed together in a blender and thrown out at once.  
“Maybe your head is slightly worse than I thought,” he mumbled and his hand skirted from the steering wheel to the stick shift, slipping it from fourth to third and down to one, looking for a place to stop.  
Pulling up in an alleyway, perched behind a dustbin, the man pulled the keys out of the ignition and slipped them into his pocket before spinning round to Grantaire.  
“Are you okay?” he asked.  
Grantaire wanted to nod, but he couldn’t even lift his head. He shrunk further into himself, becoming closer to the floor again. His thoughts were turning as dark as the sky above. His mind was emptying itself piece by piece.  
Blondie lifted his face up, placing his fingers beneath his chin. Grantaire’s features were slack and his eyes were locked shut. He knew he wanted to knock the man away from him, but he was no longer in control of his body. When the man let go of him to examine the wound on the back of his head, his head crashed back down.  
“Hey, listen,” he said. It was undetermined if he could hear him, or if he’d already blacked out, but he spoke anyway. “I never meant for that to happen. Don’t get me wrong; I hate anyone who has anything to do with the government. And the warped idea of justice you officers have is unbelievable. But I didn’t mean to hurt you. I just pushed you away from me because I didn’t fancy a long prison sentence for spray painting some walls. I don’t want to go to jail at all, in fact, that’s the entire reason for my existence right now.” He paused, taking in a deep breath, realising now was not the time for him to launch into one of his justice lectures. He rushed through sentences as panic settled deep on his chest. “Listen: what I’m trying to say is as much as I despise you and your beliefs and cannot comprehend how you can live thinking that what you do is morally correct, I didn’t want to hurt you. Even less so do I want you to die. I don’t want to hurt anyone if I can help it.”  
He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a small phone. “Stay awake.”  
The screen lit up and his thumb skirted across the screen until it hovered above a name. “I’ll help you if agree to help me. I know someone who can help you. They’ll fix up the wound. But I’ll only take you there if you help me in return, when you’re healed. Do you understand, do we have an agreement? Say ‘yes’ if you agree.”  
Grantaire’s fingernails dug into his thighs. His throat was hoarse and burned but he managed to spit out a reply: “Yes.”  
He knew this was a bad decision and he could already feel the consequences pushing down on his chest. He knew he was a waste of space, but he wasn’t ready to die. Not yet. Maybe, once he was patched up and listened to whatever the guy had to say, he could get out of it. He could go running to his father for help. Like always. Either way, his head was too clouded to make an informed decision at the present. All he knew was he wasn’t ready to die.  
“Excellent,” the man said. “The name is Enjolras. I’ll take you to someone who can help.”


End file.
